Sunday 18 March 2012 15.42 EDT
First published on Sunday 18 March 2012 15.42 EDT

As with many journalists of a certain age, the television show Press Gang was a formative influence on Lisa Smosarski. "I met Julia Sawalha [who played the main character] last night, and I was so excited," she says, laughing. Which aspiring editor hasn't dreamed of steering a startup title, as Sawalha did on TV in the late 80s, into a wild success?

Smosarski launched Stylist magazine in 2009, and it has won a clutch of industry awards, increased its circulation and become a heavyweight among women's consumer magazines. By launching a free magazine reliant on a collapsing adspend, during a recession, into a female market that was saturated but also declining, with a printed product in the age of digital, it wasn't surprising, says Smosarski, that "everyone thought we were pretty nuts".

We sit in a boardroom with a glass wall that looks out on to the relatively small team (there are 21). Compact would be the estate agent's way of describing the offices of Shortlist Media, but the impression it gives, along with its exposed brick walls and ironwork staircases, is the right one – not flabby and corporate, but zippy like the upstart it is.

The publishing company built on the concept of "freemium" – upmarket titles that are distributed free on city streets – has grown from nothing to a turnover of £15.5m in five years, and its two magazines (it also publishes the men's magazine ShortList), have a combined circulation of 955,393. But its small size means there is, says Smosarski, "a straight line into your management team". Mike Soutar, the founder and chief executive, often attends Stylist's editorial meetings.

Smosarski, like other magazine editors, has a way of talking – fast-paced, direct, evangelistic about her magazine – that can make you feel that you are in an advertising pitch, but she's quick to laugh, too.

If she had any qualms about joining a free magazine after a career at big publishing companies, she won't admit to them. "It didn't worry me at all, really," she says, though that "really" hangs like a grey cloud in a clear sky. "I think that was because of ShortList though. If that hadn't existed I would have been incredibly nervous. Before ShortList, people thought free meant rubbish. They had to prove that good-quality journalism, great design, and fantastic imagery could be done on a free title."

A look back through early issues of Stylist confirms that many upmarket brands were happy to be associated from the start – keen to tap into the magazine's target readership of professional women in their 20s and 30s. "We'd obviously done extensive research and most advertisers got what we were doing," she says , though she adds other people in the industry "were cynical".

Would Stylist match this if it were a paid-for weekly? It's hard to say. The company hasn't done any research on whether people would pay for it, but my informal observations – the number of women I have seen who seek out a copy, the relatively few discarded magazines on the tube – lead me to suspect they could. As a reader, what I like are features on often weighty issues – it has tackled the gender pay gap and the lack of women in politics – that are given enough space, alongside about the right number of pages (that is, enough but not too many) of fashion and beauty. It's not the New Yorker but, by the standards of many women's magazines, it usually doesn't leave you feeling as if several million brain cells have given up.

"We knew there was a gap in the market," says Smosarski. "I think the features content was the core difference. We wanted to speak to women intelligently and we didn't feel there were many magazines doing that at the time. A lot of criticism of gossip mags was coming through from the readers – they were sick of paparazzi shots and speculation. The feedback we were getting was 'I want a magazine that talks about me, not about my man or my sex life. My career is the most important thing to me.'"

Diets are banned from the pages – "partly because they are very hard to stand up, and partly because of how they makes women feel about themselves" – and so are paparazzi shots of celebrities. Unusually among women's magazines, and especially one that relies on advertising revenue, ads for cosmetic surgery have never had a place. Last week a campaign was announced by feminist activists to ban surgery adverts, particularly in women's magazines. Smosarski says she supports this. "We would never promote [cosmetic] surgery. We do not believe any woman should have surgery for purely aesthetic reasons and prefer to encourage self-esteem and body confidence as a norm, actively rejecting diets alongside surgery." She says there has always been some feminism in the features, "and I think it has captured the moment and has been a core part of why women have engaged".

Smosarski, who is married with a young son, grew up in north London, where her parents were primary school headteachers, and she remembers devouring magazines. "I read absolutely everything – Mizz, Looks, More, Just Seventeen, Smash Hits."

The day she handed in her dissertation for her journalism degree, she got a call from Bliss, the teen magazine, offering her a job as a junior writer and, aside from work experience at a TV company as a student and a short stint as the launch editor of a website in 2000, she has always worked in magazines. At 25, she became the editor of Smash Hits. "It was a baptism of fire," she says. "To walk in and manage a team for a really big brand. I had to learn so much so quickly. It was fantastic."

Later, she became the editor of More magazine, aimed at young women, overseeing its transition from a fortnightly to a weekly. "I've worked in Smash Hits song words, and position of the fortnight [More's infamous sex tips page]," she laughs.

Stylist was launched on a three-year business plan but it started making money in its first year. Smosarski, unsurprisingly, is a champion of free media. "The speed of communication, social media, the concept of an individual as a publisher, means the media world has to change. To work in this market and not feel comfortable with that, I think, would be dangerous. Where people have found a way to produce content and to make a living, how could I be resentful of that?"

Does being a free title mean being more beholden to advertisers? "No reader is stupid enough not to see paid-for content. We have to have integrity. Obviously it would be naive of me to say advertisers are not essential to what we do, of course they are. But it isn't different, it's the same relationship we have editorially [as any other magazine]."

Smosarski has never spent long in a job, and she has nearly been at Stylist for nearly three years. She laughs and says, "it has been noted before", but she insists she isn't planning to move on. "I have found a magazine in Stylist that is so exciting, it's not formulaic and the year ahead is going to be brilliant."

Next week the magazine has a (very light) redesign, it wants to distribute in more cities, and extra effort is being put into the website and daily email newsletter.

"We're doing well in a tough marketplace and readers are still incredibly excited about what we're doing," she says. "This was my baby. Stylist is a bit of me and I want to go on that journey with it."